It has been noted in the past few years that high school students — and teenagers in general — do not, on average, get nearly enough sleep. I have been interviewing a variety of ASFA high school students to figure out a general bedtime average for our student body, and then break it down into grade bedtime averages.
After crunching the numbers for the total responses I received, I have learned that, as a school, the general time we go to sleep is at almost exactly 12 a.m. I know to a lot of you, and to myself, 12 a.m. doesn’t seem like too late a time to sleep, but we have to factor in how this affects our sleep schedule on a wider scale.
Assume a student’s commute from home to school takes just under thirty minutes, which means that they would have to be out the door before 7:30 a.m. Assuming this hypothetical student has responsibilities in the morning, they might have to wake up at 6 a.m.
While six hours isn’t too shabby, preteens and teenagers are shown to need somewhere between 8 and 10 hours of REM sleep to function properly. Not only does it take over an hour to get into REM sleep, which means we can subtract an hour from our original answer, but it’s very unlikely that said student would fall asleep the moment they laid down. Subtract that hour and, say, 30 minutes spent tossing and turning, and we come up with the results that this student is getting 4 hours and 30 minutes of sleep — barely over half the minimum they would need to function properly.
Now, for specific grade ranges, we’ll start with the seniors. From what I collected, on average, an ASFA senior goes to bed at 10 p.m. to 10:30 p.m., a little bit earlier than the majority average. If we factor in the same equation we did previously, the average senior at our school is getting 6 hours and 30 minutes of REM sleep at the most — enough to function, but not enough to feel well — rested and ready for the day.
Assuming that the change between senior and junior sleep ranges would be fairly small , I was shocked when I came to the conclusion that, on average, a junior goes to sleep from 12 a.m. to 2 a.m.! So, at the most, using our basic equation (waking at 6 a.m., spending thirty minutes tossing and turning, spending one hour getting into REM sleep), the average eleventh grader at our school receives, at best 4 hours and 30 minutes of sleep, and, at worst, 2 hours and 30 minutes of sleep.
Next, of course, we’ll be factoring the sophomores into it. The average bedtime for a sophomore typically ranges from 11:30 p.m. to 12 a.m. Putting the first result in, the tenth-grade student would receive five hours of sleep, while students who fall asleep at twelve would get, as stated in the second paragraph, four hours and thirty minutes of sleep.
Now, for the freshmen. I found an average bedtime of 11:30 p.m., which, when factored into the equation, would be the same as the first result for sophomores, leaving ninth graders with five hours as an average amount of sleep.
I feel a sense of urgency to do something about these statistics, because sleep is one of the most important things a human being requires for survival. While I doubt any student will die from lack of sleep, it is shown that not getting those 8 to 10 hours of REM sleep can result in complications in mental health such as anxiety and depression, poor behavior and focus, and even slowed development in the brain, which is supposed to stop development somewhere around age 25.
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Well done STAR reporters and editors!